Theology and Social Commentary

Category: Christianity

There has long been controversy over Ephesians 5:15-33 and the question of the submission of a wife to her husband. With so much media attention (rightly) focused on pay gaps between the sexes and abusive and exploitative behaviour towards women in society, resistance to the idea that women ought to submit to their husbands is only likely to grow.

In this post, I aim simply to emphasise what seem to be clear guiding principles regarding headship and submission from this text—an issue that is not just important for marriage, but also because it influences how we understand the roles of men and women in the church “family” and Christian leadership more generally.

The HEadship of the Husband

Paul spends considerably more time defining the husband’s responsibilities than those of the wife, probably because his role is much more likely to be misunderstood.

Ephesians 5 begins with a general call for all of us to imitate God and to model our behaviour on the self-sacrificial love of Christ (5:1-2). The instructions that follow are all expressions of a relational principle encapsulated in Christ’s example: that of self-giving love for the other, rather than our natural impulse to serve ourselves.

While this is the general principle governing all of the household relationships, it is also one of the two illustrations that Paul applies specifically to the husband’s role in marriage. In particular, the husband should:

Love his wife with the kind of self-sacrifice with which Christ loved the church (5:25; cf. 5:2b)

Love his wife with the same measure of self-interest with which he would naturally love his own body (5:28-29)

“I’d die for you”

It is easy to talk about altruism. It is absurdly common to hear a man promise to die for his beloved (there are songs of this title by at least Air Supply, Bon Jovi, and The Weeknd), but it is just as common to hear of relationships dissolving because the man preferring to watch TV than to talk to his wife, or because he would never pick up his underwear off the floor. But we are almost never called upon to show love by dying. Love is tested by self-sacrifice in the decisions and annoyances of daily life. Paul’s second illustration is perhaps more challenging because it is a more common and realistic test: do you care for your wife like you feed your own body?

If these are the standards that Christ gives us for headship, it is obvious that this offers no licence for the husband to operate in a self-serving way. Paul is not arguing that the man is in God’s position in the sense that he is deserving of her unquestioning obedience. No, he says that the man is in Christ’s position in the sense that he is to empty himself for her sake. Those are very different analogies. Headship doesn’t compel obedience; it offers care and service.

“That he might sanctify her”

Between the analogies of Christ’s crucifixion (5:25) and our natural self-care (5:28), Paul discusses Christ’s purpose for sacrificing himself—namely, that his “bride” would be sanctified and purified of her blemishes. This is also instructive.

Note again that this is not to imply that the husband is responsible for his wife’s sanctification. That, I take it, remains Christ’s work. It is not suggesting that the husband should decide what is best for his wife. No, Paul explicitly draws the parallel: “In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.” It is a more general statement of care for the other in place of care for oneself.

I think that what verses 26-27 should do is deepen our perception of what it means to give oneself up for another. These verses remind us that when Christ gave himself up for his bride, she was not a bride who was already pure and beautiful. He gave himself up for a church in rebellion—the same church that crucified him—so that she would learn love.

So, if we would follow Christ’s example in our marriages, the argument from Ephesians seems to me not to support the idea that husbands can compel respect or submission or obedience, nor that the responsibility to love is in any way contingent on her “doing her end” and submitting (see the converse in 1 Peter 3:1-2, in which wives are encouraged to submit to unworthy husbands so that they might be won over). Husbands love their wives as Christ did: unconditionally, sacrificially and labouring to see them flourish.

The submission of the wife

In the same way as a husband loves his wife in imitation of Christ, the submission of the wife is equally an expression of this principle of imitation.

It is possible that Paul commands the submission of wife for husband because it was an expected social convention, and not necessarily because it is eternally the will of God for husbands to be heads and women to be in subjection. Either way the basic principle is the same: Christian submission is something that all of us must practice (Ephesians 5:21), because it acknowledges that order is a gift of God, and that it is an expression of love to behave respectfully within those orders that exist. (This is why we can still approve of Paul’s relational advice to slaves and masters in chapter 6 as wise, even though we would all disavow that social order.)

Paul commands submission because it is a means by which a wife can also give up her own self-serving desires and live out Christ’s love in her marriage. In this way there is a kind of equality, even in the midst of a social hierarchy: both headship and submission are expressions of love and self-sacrifice for the benefit of the other.

Christian Headship

Even if we accept the interpretation that male headship is God’s eternal pattern for human relationships, it seems to me that some Christian applications of this principle go beyond what this text teaches. The idea that a husband should be the family decision-maker does not follow from the fact of his headship. The idea that the husband rules the home and that the wife may offer no dissent is incoherent in the face of the example of Christ’s self-sacrifice that we are given.

This passage also does not dictate the terms of submission in marriage nor the roles that each sex should fulfil. There is no specific content to submission in this text—it does not seem to mean having no opinion, tending the home, having children, or earning less than the husband. Submission is merely made synonymous with respect (v33). A subservient, stay-at-home mum can live without ever respecting her husband, and a woman can be a CEO and respect her stay-at-home husband perfectly well. The point, in this text at least, is not to define social roles, but to encourage Christlike other-person-centredness in whatever roles we occupy.

The great difference between the headship of the husband and that of Christ is that Jesus is in nature God. The husband, on the other hand, is in nature a fool (hopefully undergoing some degree of transition towards wisdom). As wisdom literature keeps reminding us, none of us always knows what the best thing to do is, and we ignore advice and instruction at our peril. The wise man is humble and aware of his short-comings. As 1Corinthians reminds us, this is also why we have all been equipped with various gifts—we are inadequately equipped on our own. Christian headship, whether of the home or the church, ought to be continually aware of its need for instruction, correction, help, guidance etc. from the rest of the body. In marriage, that is primarily the service that wives provide. Similarly, the heads of Christian organisations ought to benefit from gifted individuals in the body—whether they are male or female.

Christian headship should avoid altruistic claims of servant-leadership (such as the promise to die for your loved ones or public foot-washing ceremonies) while at the same time ignoring the annoying day-to-day concerns of those under one’s care. Servant leadership sets aside the needs and wants and egos of the leader and focuses on the needs of the family.

Conclusion

If you are agitated by a picture of a headship in which the husband is so dominated by the concerns of his wife and in which the leader puts his employees and members first, then you’ve probably understood Paul correctly.

By nature we seek power and independence. Submission and headship are both ways in which we lose our claim to either.

The Harvey Weinstein case has launched the #MeToo campaign that has given much-needed space for victims of abuse and harassment to be heard. That there is a #ChurchToo tag that is gaining impetus should highlight the degree to which a low view of women and the impulse to protect men is also found in leading Christian institutions. For example, serious allegations have recently been made against:

The Master’s University: At a seminary associated with John MacArthur, a past student claims that she had been drugged and sexually abused by a friend of male students. As part of the ‘handling’ of the assault, the university is alleged to have put her in the same room as her attacker and insisted on mutual repentance and forgiveness. She struggled with the idea of repenting for being raped, and allegedly she was eventually forced out of the school.

Sovereign Grace Ministries: At the group of churches overseen by the Mahaneys, several cases of abuse, including child rape and molestation, have allegedly been covered up over the course of decades.

Andy Savage: Prominent pastor Andy Savage recently apologised publicly for a sexual sin committed when he was a younger youth pastor, which involved driving a 17-year-old youth member to a secluded place, instead of to her home as he had said, exposing himself and requesting oral sex. This was covered up by his minister at the time.

I don’t know to what degree the details as reported are correct, and in the case of MacArthur and Mahaney, they have denied knowledge of the specifics, but there appears to be sexual impropriety that is either criminal or, in Andy Savage’s case, spared from being so only by inhabiting the blurry areas of laws of consent. In each case, ministry leaders seem to have responded to complaints against perpetrators with cover-up and even victim blaming.

Perhaps more details will emerge to partially or fully exonerate some of these leaders, but either way, there is clearly something seriously wrong with the way in which our culture views women, and in the way in which usually male leadership deals with the victims. Even in #ChurchToo.

Why protect attackers?

Sometimes the ‘wisdom’ that church leaders apply to extreme cases reveals more about their personal value system than biblical justice. Motivations for suppressing sexual abuse scandals include that the Bible says we shouldn’t drag one another to court, or that it would embarrass the church, or that prosecuting the man would “destroy his life”.

Yes, the Bible encourages us to deal with disputes internally and without dragging one another to court. However, the issues in question tend to be matters of honour and shame or private debt rather than criminal behaviour.

On the contrary, Romans 13 insists that earthly authorities have been given the sword by God to execute justice and that it is the wrongdoer who rightly ought to be afraid of God’s secular servants of justice. Matters of criminality belong to the state. Church members, more so than other citizens not less, are accountable to the good laws of the society in which they live.

Furthermore, in 1 Corinthians 5, Paul criticises the church for protecting someone whose offence would have been seen as taboo throughout the ancient world. For the sake of the body, the reputation of the church, and indeed for the one found in sin, Paul commands that the person be expelled (even though the consequences might be severe [v.5]):

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. (1Co 5:1-2)

Paul criticises the Corinthians for being less wise and less morally upright than their non-Christian neighbours and he implies that the protection of such people does not insulate the church from shame, it is a source of shame.

The protection of sexual predators and other criminals in the church is evidently foolish and evil to the watching world, and these crimes clearly fall under the God-given authority of state justice (not merely internal church dispute). More than this, it seems to me to be a violation of what James 1 calls “undefiled religion”: we ought to be protecting the vulnerable, the weak, the disenfranchised, not those who exploit them. As Amos says, with crimes such as sexual abuse of the vulnerable very much in mind: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

Who do we value?

Finally, it seems to me that the treatment of aggressor and victim in cases such as the ones listed above might be an outworking of a skewed valuation of men and women in our churches. In spite of the fact that rape and sexual assault often damages or destroys the lives of victims, the concern is often for the “destroyed life” of the attacker should he be prosecuted. The idea that mutual repentance and forgiveness is appropriate in the case of a sex crime (and even the forced reconciliation of victim and attacker) is a shocking example of victim blaming that assumes women are complicit in their own assaults. It should worry us deeply that we feel the loss of a male leader more keenly than the damage done to his victim.

Furthermore, although the damage done by rape and assault can be immeasurable for the individual, a skewed valuation of women and the everyday sexism in which it is expressed is a steady, erosive drip that does widespread, ongoing damage. We should be appalled at the shocking stories of criminal abuses of women in church, but if we mourn the extreme injustices, should we not be working harder to expose the smaller, more covert prejudice against women in our church culture?

Conclusion

Our leaders are fallible and life is messy, and so it should not be too surprising that they have often invoked “biblical wisdom” in their judgments while making a mess of their ethics.

The point I’m hoping to make is that this is an extreme presentation of a problem that might be deeper and more subtle in our churches. For all our claims of love for others and equal value assigned to all, evidence keeps emerging that conservatives have inherited a culture that assigns different value to the sexes—and has made a virtue of discrimination. It is a culture that seems to me at least in part to be based more on mid-century values than the Scriptures it invokes.

For the next little while, I want to devote some posts to an investigation of this issue. I can’t hope to do all of its facets the remotest justice, but I hope to provoke some honest examination of ourselves and the Bible so that we can be clear where our church culture is driven by Scripture and where everyday sexism takes over.

EDIT: I just came across this article about a Modesto woman abused several years ago (over a period of years) by a now-prominent pastor (http://www.modbee.com/news/article202019094.html). It underlines several things, including that motivations for covering up abuse include that it will cause embarrassment for the church.

Churches and denominations are often guilty of talking themselves up in unrealistic ways. In certain charismatic and Pentecostal churches, for example, there is the perception that their calmer brethren are devoid of the Spirit. In the non-denominational church that I grew up in we seemed to think that the big Anglican church down the road was where our lukewarm members would defect to if they tired of our zeal and wanted to be anonymous.

One of the long-standing fictions that has befouled the denomination in which I now serve (and which in some measure is most likely true of every church) is that we are “getting it right” in a way that other churches are not. We have the Spirit (unlike the mainline churches). We have the Spirit without performative excesses (unlike the charismatics). We teach the Bible faithfully and well (and people only don’t flock to come hear us because we don’t tell itching ears what they want to hear).

All of us (I guess) believe our way is right, or else surely we’d do things another way, and so such prejudices are part of being human. Fortunately, many of our leaders have been self-critical enough to oppose such silly rhetoric.

Nevertheless, there is a fiction that our leaders might need to recognise in themselves, and that I think is universal enough to be worth raising more generally. For all our talk of servant leadership, it seems as though we actually have some difficulty coping with positions of authority, especially when a leader is clearly gifted in certain areas, and when God has used such leaders in the past. It can become difficult for such people to relinquish control or to acknowledge that God might gift and use others (even in their own congregation) without their help or permission.

I am prompted to bring it up because I discovered an interesting formulation of the problem in a book I am now reading about the prophet Samuel by an author named Marti Steussy.

Steussy is asking the question whether Samuel the prophet perhaps isn’t entirely blameless in the conflicts with Saul, and whether he isn’t motivated a little bit by the rejection of his own leadership and a desire to see Saul fail? (I think I probably disagree with her suggestions in this case, but nevertheless, the question is good. Whether one sees it in Samuel or not, it is certainly true that all of Israel’s leaders were deeply mixed characters, and it is appropriate to ask whether they are behaving rightly at any given point.) About the possibility that Samuel is over-stepping in his old age, Steussy writes:

“I have heard yet another kind of reaction to Samuel from students whose church traditions accord extremely high respect and authority to the pastor. A handful of such students have told me that Samuel reminds them of pastors they have known… These mentors were powerful, well-loved leaders who had earned respect by years of wise advice and courageous leadership. But eventually their leadership would be challenged, and the results could be ugly. The pastors seemed unable to accept that others might responsibly differ in their assessments of where the church should go. Too quickly, sometimes, the pastors equated questioning of their own programs with disobedience to God… Sometimes they used their power not only to resist but to punish those who, in their view, stepped out of line… Always they were hurt and confused by what they perceived as the ungratefulness of their congregations.” (Samuel and his God, p. 6)

Now I am not disputing that there is a legitimate problem when members of a congregation become divisive and oppose the pastor in ungodly ways. However, it is surely necessary to acknowledge that there is equally a possibility for leaders to become too convinced of their own centrality to what goes on in a congregation? Surely leaders can assert their leadership in ways that are arrogant or divisive or controlling?

Batman at the end of The Dark Knight preferred to die a hero rather than to live long enough to become the villain, and my concern is that leaders all run the risk of neglecting the wisdom of this idea. Countries often become enslaved to their old liberators, and church leaders too can become guilty of believing their own hype.

As wrong as Israel’s request for a king might have been, Samuel had raised wicked sons and intended to hand the reins over to them. When the people resisted that idea, he took it to be that they were rejecting his leadership. God had to re-align his thinking even on that point. Samuel’s leadership was only ever a proxy of God’s own rule—it was God they were rejecting.

The Apostle Paul, on the other hand (himself not a blameless character), was able to view opposition to his ministry with remarkable humility. When other preachers were trying to raise their own profile and add to his misery in prison—genuine selfishness on their part—what was Paul’s response? At least the gospel is being preached! (Php. 1:18)

Similarly, Christian leaders need to take extreme care that they cultivate humility and a deep sense of the precarious responsibility that they exercise. We who hold some position of leadership need to acknowledge with Paul that our achievements are losses (Php. 3:7) and that our only responsibility is the advance of the gospel. We might be called shepherds of the flock, but we are not owners. In another real sense, we are sheep ourselves. Whatever role you might think you have, it is Christ who is the head, and he demands that we recognise that our place in the body is limited and partial. The minister needs the church more than the church needs the minister: “The body does not consist of one member but of many” (1Co 12:14), and “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1Co 12:7). Ministers do not lead a dumb flock; on the contrary, the point of good leadership is to facilitate the exercise of everyone’s gifts.

All Christians, but our leaders most especially, need to consciously and regularly remove ourselves from any thoughts that we are central to God’s plan. We are to remember that whatever gifts we have are lent to us, and they are to be humbly exercised for the gospel, for the many, and for the common good.

If it takes deep humility to become a Christian, how much more does it take to lead other Christians? May God help us all to give humility pride-of-place among the virtues.

I have had a couple of unfortunate run-ins with begging the question lately, the most recent being a suggested video from YouTube featuring Ricky Gervais.

I chose this version of the video both because it was the one that YouTube initially recommended and because its headline writer is so heart-warmingly excited about how much they agree with Gervais

Begging the Question

Begging the question is quite difficult to understand firstly because it is popularly misused when we want to say “raising the question” or “failing to answer the question”, and secondly because it uses archaic language to tag what is already a reasonably confusing idea. For all that, it is nevertheless an argument fallacy that is shockingly common.

One is begging the question when one’s argument requires the desired conclusion to be true for the argument itself to work; in other words, one is ‘begging’ one’s hearer to accept as true the very thing that one is trying to prove (the ‘question’). Like I said, it is quite confusing.

It is not unlike the classic loaded question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” While it requires a yes/no answer, both options are incriminating. You either have beaten your wife, or you still are. The way that the question is phrased pushes you to admit guilt. In a similar way, begging the question also requires the hearer to accept something undesirable as a fact, and that ‘something’ is the very conclusion that is under dispute.

For example, I have come across a ‘proof for God’s existence’ that has as one of its premises that the Bible is inspired; thereafter, it follows that the Bible claims that God exists, and therefore God must exist. It is a slightly better argument when not abbreviated like this, but to use inspiration as a premise for this argument begs the question because inspiration (when used of the Bible) is the idea that God is ultimately its author. In other words, the premise depends on God existing; it doesn’t prove that God exists.

How Does Ricky Beg the Question?

One of the early arguments in the linked video is that if religion were not spoken about at all to children, then we’d see a ‘different pattern’ in society; i.e. people mostly only believe religious ideas because they are inculcated very early on and with the same level of unquestionable authority as “don’t touch the fire” or “don’t go near the wolf”.

At about 1m30s, he says,

“If [religion] is given that same level of credence and truth, you’re never going to get over it. It’s going to be a lot harder to undo that.”

On one level, I agree with him. Religion, in general, has often survived because of fear and indoctrination. As I am someone who finds only one religion credible, I would also agree with him that most religious teaching needs to be ‘got over’.

It is unfortunate that Christendom at points in history most certainly used fear and coercion to keep up the numbers (and some Christians continue to do this ), though I would argue this approach is opposed to Christian theology. In fact, the movement that had to rescue Christianity from Christendom (i.e. the Reformation) claimed their gospel as a message of liberation and freedom, over against the fear and manipulation of the church. In other words, (although this is very reductionistic) the most prominent and violent Christian conflict in history was waged in order to free Christian theology from authoritarian Imperial control.

But as an argument for atheism, I think that Gervais is (among other things) begging the question. Why? Because we can only agree with him that it is bad to teach children about God if God is a myth that we’ve invented (as the question at 0m30s claims). In other words, if the atheists are correct and there is no God, then yes, it is unfortunate that myths are propagated as truth. However, if there is a God, then one would be doing massive harm by raising children as though there isn’t, because the assumptions that underpin naturalism are equally hard to undo.

Christianity ultimately depends on the resurrection of Christ having been an historical event. There is good evidence for it, but how you process that evidence depends in large measure on unprovable presuppositions that you bring with you. If it is possible that there is a God who cares about the world, then there is nothing impossible about the idea of a resurrection that was the ultimate demonstration of that love for the world. If, on the other hand, you would say with the likes of Hume and Dawkins that a lie is always overwhelmingly more likely than a miracle, then what evidence for the resurrection would ever persuade you?

We’re all responsible for training our children in how to make sense of the world. It is unavoidable and it is never neutral. As with all the other circumstances of their birth and upbringing, what we give them will either prove to be a blessing or a curse. As I experience following Jesus to be an uncoerced and unqualified good, I have no fear in recommending it to my children. If it proves to be a mirage in this desert, then pity my hope if you like.

Ricky is concerned that religion is bullied into kids, and I agree that this is bad. Ricky would rather that kids be given the opportunity to choose without coercion, and again I agree that this is good. We even both seem to agree that teaching kids to think is good. But I disagree with him that atheists have a monopoly on that.

I frequently urge our theology students here in Cape Town to be willing to disagree with the celebrated commentators and theologians whom they read, because our natural state is to revere those scholars who have major published works and who have become household names, and defer to them as authorities instead of testing what they say.

It was surprising (on one level) to see one such celebrated scholar coming out in support of Donald Trump this week. Wayne Grudem is well known here for his accessible Systematic Theology, and for partnering with John Piper on the less-good Biblical Manhood and Womanhood stuff. But he has ably demonstrated his human fallibility by radically over-correcting the anti-Trump sentiment that he detects among some of his peers. His article featured on Town Hall is an attempt at an ethical argument in favour of Trump, but it is deeply disappointing on several levels.

I must say up front that I am not American, not particularly knowledgeable about politics or economics, and I do not have much expertise when it comes to speaking about Trump or Clinton. And disdain for Trump is in no way to be read as support for Hillary. Right at the start of the primaries I joked at how ridiculous it would be if the Americans had to choose between these two arch-demons, and now a year later or so (and one Brexit under the belt), here we are. Democracy this year keeps delivering the theatre of the absurd.

Christian or Republican? Pick one

As an outsider to American culture, I feel I am at least well placed to see what is harder to recognise from the inside, and one seemingly regular problem in the States, and a pervasive one in Grudem’s article, is the unfortunate confusion of Republicanism and Christianity.

For example, Grudem speaks as though it is Christian duty to support big business over big government, to affirm that government spending on healthcare is bad and that government spending on America’s big military is good. These are big Republican issues, but they seem to me to be preferences and not Christian issues.

It seems to me that Christians can support (well enough) several of the positions of either party as being compatible with their Christian faith. The Republicans can’t, it seems to me, keep claiming that all their preferences are the Christian ones, just because they are policies that are broadly thought of as conservative. And it is certainly true that Christians need to be Christians first and party-members second—it is not an article of the faith to be on the right wing.

Freedom

The second issue concerns freedom. His slippery-slope argument that Hillary would install ‘liberal activist judges’, who would then curtail freedom of speech and religion, promote more odious abortions laws etc.—if true—was the most persuasive reason for voting Trump (though Hillarophobia is still not an argument that Trump is a good candidate). He provided several anecdotes of tendencies in American society to vilify anyone for holding to religious or moral convictions that have recently become unpopular. If that is a fair assessment, it is worrying.

But his column is also angling for ‘Christian’ government (headed by Trump! Can you imagine that?) so that there can be prayer in schools, or on the football field before games, Grudem specifically adds, and other explicit government-backed promotions of Christianity in public.

I am confused as to why it is the government’s job to promote one religion to a people that clearly are not of homogeneous views on the matter. It’s all very well for Grudem when it is a ‘Christian’ party that stands to inherit the throne, but how would he feel if it were a Muslim party? Would he be advocating the government’s role in promoting respect for the name of God then, or would he be talking up the importance of pluralism and government sticking to secular policy and not meddling with religious freedom?

By all means advocate that Christians should be allowed to be Christian in public, but making non-Christians observe prayer times etc. seems like a wrong turn to me. That’s not religious freedom. It’s religious constraint of which you happen to approve.

Trump’s Promises

Perhaps the worst thing about Grudem’s article is its disingenuity. He is happy, it seems, to parrot Trump’s ludicrous campaign promises as though they were fait accompli, and to paint Clinton’s campaign as though she were Jezebel herself.

Trump is full of big promises and talks eagerly about the wonderful end product (America will be great again!), but has no political experience and rarely will be drawn on how he intends to reach these idyllic goals. And when he is, lest we forget, the solutions tend to be one part racism and one part nonsense. Ban all Muslims from the US. Build a wall on the Mexican border.

For an ethicist, Grudem is remarkably uncritical about this. In fact, he specifically approves of the idea that acts of terror and immigration policies are connected (“Trump has repeatedly promised that he will finally secure our borders, an urgent need to protect the nation from ever more terrorists and drug smugglers.”), and says things like this:

“Trump will not let China and Russia and Iran push us around anymore, as Obama has done, with Hillary Clinton’s support when she was secretary of state. If Trump is anything, he is tough as nails, and he won’t be bullied.”

Trump doesn’t seem tough to me, he seems insecure, but even granting this, how does one ‘get tough’ with China or Putin in constructive ways? Getting ‘tough’ with Al Qaida led to expensive and unpopular wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, and rather than resolving the tense anti-American atmosphere in the Middle East, we now have yet another anti-West group in Isis. But Grudem remains convinced that Trump knows the answer; the answer is to defeat them:

“Trump has pledged to aggressively attack and utterly defeat ISIS”.

That’s it. No plan (but for another implied ‘big push’); just a declaration of the nearly impossible end result.

The fact that Trump’s policies often represent a convenient about-turn on what he has claimed in the past, and the idea that he was motivated to run because of his concern for America’s poor, and not because he was mercilessly humiliated at more than one White House correspondent’s dinner, these are things for which Grudem also gives Trump a free pass.

Trump’s character

Grudem is aware that Trump is a man of weak character. He concedes:

“He is egotistical, bombastic, and brash. He often lacks nuance in his statements. Sometimes he blurts out mistaken ideas (such as bombing the families of terrorists) that he later must abandon. He insults people. He can be vindictive when people attack him. He has been slow to disown and rebuke the wrongful words and actions of some angry fringe supporters. He has been married three times and claims to have been unfaithful in his marriages.”

What I find odd is that, as a Christian, Grudem can see these as matters of little consequence. Leaving aside that marital unfaithfulness was enough evidence for Republicans that Mr Clinton was unfit for office, the Bible is witheringly critical of people who are proud and lovers of money. Pride and avarice are not uncommon in politicians, but Trump is the eager epitome of each of these things. This is a man who refuses to forget that the editor of Vanity Fair called him a “Short-fingered vulgarian” in 1988. Pride is not a small problem; it is a crippling danger in leadership, which is why it is telling that the greatest biblical leaders, especially Moses and Jesus (cf. Num. 12:3), were characterised as humble, and the wicked kings and Pharaohs are proud. The Bible repeatedly says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

Grudem fails to mention how often Trump has been caught out as a liar, and he fails to mention dishonest and exploitative business ventures such as Trump University in which he made clear promises about the quality of the programmes on offer that were never kept.

To call him a “good candidate with flaws” is a galling whitewash. Speaking of whitewashing…

“On the other hand, I think some of the accusations hurled against him are unjustified. His many years of business conduct show that he is not racist or anti-(legal) immigrant or anti-Semitic or misogynistic – I think these are unjust magnifications by a hostile press exaggerating some careless statements he has made.”

Mr Grudem, if he says bigoted things in unguarded moments, it pretty much means he’s a bigot.

Clear argument fallacies

And finally, the reasons given why Trump is good in spite of all appearances to the contrary are often remarkably devoid of critical thinking. Grudem says:

“Many who have known him personally speak highly of his kindness, thoughtfulness, and generosity.”

Dave Barry answered this one several years ago:

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person. Or as Jesus put it: “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32). Someone who is able to be pleasant to those to whom he has an interest in being pleasant is not a remarkable person. It is the person who is able to be kind and generous to those who are opposed to them who is genuinely praiseworthy. Trump is clearly and publicly not that guy.

Grudem also says,

“These American citizens recognize that Trump has built a business career on listening to experts, solving problems, and getting things done. They realize that Trump didn’t earn $4 billion by being stupid, and their instinct says that he might be exactly the right person to solve some of the biggest problems in a nation that has for too long been headed in the wrong direction and stuck in political gridlock.”

I am again surprised that Grudem confuses being rich with having virtue and competence. Apart from anything else, Trump earned $4b by inheriting it from his dad, if I am not mistaken. But even if he is good at making money, there is no reason to expect that it is a transferable skill, or that Trump is reliable in other areas. Convincing a fellow capitalist that you can make them lots of money and convincing Iran not to build nukes have very little in common. (Also, if riches and problem solving make Trump a good candidate, why not Pablo Escobar?)

As for the comment about political gridlock, that problem seems to me to be the result of the long-standing refusal of Republicans and Democrats to work together, largely, it seems, because the rhetoric that one side uses of the other (as this column typifies) is routinely full of prejudiced, fallacious views of the other’s position. I expected that Grudem would show his opponents the charity of representing them fairly, but he uses the same polarising, us-and-them tactics that he thinks Donald Trump will fix.

The only way that Trump will fix political gridlock, and this really is a reason to vote for him, is that surely this time Republicans and Democrats together will be united in undermining their president. Already some Republican leaders have admitted that they will vote Democrat, because sometimes the party has to come second.

Grudem argues in his column that some Republican Christians “may feel it is easier just to stay away from this messy Trump-Clinton election, and perhaps not even vote. But the teachings of Scripture do not allow us to escape moral responsibility by saying that we decided to do nothing.” He is incorrect that not voting is the same as doing nothing. Not voting can also be a statement that the system that produced Donald Trump as a viable candidate is terminally ill. It is a statement of protest against the prejudicial propaganda that delights more in spoiling the opponent than listening to them and that has led to the political gridlock that he mentions.

It is disappointing that Grudem has encouraged Christian support for Trump, not because Christians should rather support Hillary, but because Christians should represent integrity and love for their enemies, and they can’t do that by supporting a ‘Christian’ candidate of patently anti-Christian character, and they can’t do that by perpetuating the divisive rhetoric that has led to the sorry state of affairs that America seems to be in. In my opinion, an article about the Christian vote in the upcoming election should rather be characterised by mourning and much searching of heart.

I must confess – I have been known to be a boring preacher. Often being boring is not a matter of preparation or expertise, or style of delivery. Often we bore people because we fail to consider purpose.

What characterises a bore? Imagine you’re at a social occasion—perhaps a dinner or a dance. What is this bore doing? The bore would not be sitting with me, watching others dance and wondering “What does this all mean?” The bore is not fiddling with his or her phone or reading a book or otherwise failing to be exciting. Invariably, he or she is talking—talking too much while everyone else wonders, “Why are you telling me this?”

I still recall sitting with a distant relative and being told about the size and value-for-money of a pie he had bought and how long it took him to eat it—he told this story for about half an hour.

In our circles we pride ourselves in the quality of our preaching—how rigorously we are schooled in the Bible and how faithfully we present the word of God—but I suspect some of us preachers are at risk of having too much in common with the average bore. Of course, talking too much is not the issue—preaching is, if nothing else, the act of talking while a group of people (often against their will) sits and listens. What we may share in common, though, is the question we provoke in the minds of our listeners: “What is your point?”

Preaching instruction often focuses heavily on shaping the content that our prospective preachers will present—whether by finding the supposed ‘main idea’ of the text, or by mastering a basic three-point structure, or by stating, illustrating and applying each point. These are helpful guides for rookies, but not the only essentials to preaching.

Alternatively, preaching training might emulate a Toastmasters group in emphasising the delivery of the message—as if varying tone and pace, making eye contact, waving your arms, or mastering Powerpoint will engage the audience. It helps, but above all it is content that matters. If the audience is superficially entertained, you might have helped them avoid boredom, but the nagging dissatisfaction of not knowing why will remain—“Why are you telling me this?”

I have borrowed Rick Warren’s ‘Purpose-Driven’ trademark (at least until the cease-and-desist order) to address what I think is a chief shortcoming in much of today’s preaching—it lacks awareness of purpose. There are too many outstanding ‘why?’ questions. I don’t know why the preacher is saying what he’s saying; I’m not sure that heknows why he’s saying what he’s saying (except perhaps that it has to do with the text); and I’m not sure that the preacher knows why the author of the text is saying what he’s saying.

A key difference between good preaching and boring preaching is to recognise that a sermon is a piece of communication. Ordinary communication is always purpose-driven: we have something we wish to tell a certain hearer for a certain reason, and we select what we say accordingly. And unlike at church, if we take too long, we’ll be told to get to the point. Communication aims to achieve a certain purpose in the hearer—and so communication is only as effective as the ability of the hearer to receive it. In preaching, it doesn’t matter how good your preparation in your study is, if you do not accommodate the message to the level and needs of your audience, the message will pass them by.

There is ultimately no difference between excellent exegesis that no one heard and a terrible exposition of the text that no one heard. In either case, no one heard it.

We often spend too much time re-saying things that are in the text, just because they are in the text. This is to forget that preaching is an act of communication, and that communication is ultimately listener-focused. The listener becomes bored not because the Bible is boring, but because he or she doesn’t know why you’re repeating what it says. Why are you telling me this?

By contrast, being listener-focused means:

understanding your audience well enough to know why they ought to listen to the message—if you haven’t found something about the text that you absolutely have to tell them, perhaps you should look again or pick a new text;

making sure that your audience understandswhy they ought to listen—sermons should self-consciously persuade the audience of the importance of the message; and

applying the text (i.e. teasing out the implications for the listener, or showing how the text confronts us all and demands change) is as important as the content itself.

Preaching is an act of communication: it is about taking a message from God given millennia ago, and communicating it (by God’s help) powerfully and prophetically to your own audience. This demands that we know why the original author said what he did to his people, and that we know why we’re saying what we’re saying to ours. Being ‘faithful to the text’ is only half the job of preaching; being faithful as a preacher means making sure that the text is heard.

If you’ve chosen what to say with a sense of purpose, and if you convince your hearer of that purpose, you’ll inspire less boredom and more people.

Some Advice for Preachers

1. Make sure to answer more ‘Why?’ questions than ‘What?’ questions. Your message should be an act of persuasion—you should be addressing the will of your hearer with God’s word.

2. About whatever you choose to say, you must be able to answer the question, “Why is this important?” And the answer should not be “For your information” (at least not too often).

3. Don’t let application be an afterthought, and don’t let it be shallow. Spend more time on it than you think you should, and spend more time in the study generating ideas about how the text might address different groups in your congregation or people in various stages of life.

4. Vague, boring application is often the result of vague, generalised understanding of the text. Preaching only the ‘main point’ (if it is used as an excuse to dispense with the detail) leads to the same repetitive generalisations emerging week-by-week. The unique contribution(s) of each text are as important as its ‘big point’, especially in application. Understand texts in detail, even if your resultant sermons remain simple (in fact, simplicity is born of depth of understanding).

5. When applying the text, be specific and concrete rather than generalised and abstract. For example, don’t only tell people that God hates idolatry (so don’t put anything else in God’s place). Almost everybody will say that God is the most important thing in their life—until you delve into how much they trust their money, or defend their reputation, or in practice prefer their leisure.

In the news today, a Californian ‘pastor’ found his biggest ever audience after his message about the attack on the gay club in Florida went global.

In his message, he called for ‘normal people’ to stand up against wickedness—a call that I think I ought to answer.

He also claimed that the uproar about his message is an attack on free speech, but this is incorrect. Free speech encourages the testing of ideas in the market of public opinion; it is the same free speech that allows him to say such things that also allows the rest of us to respond with vitriol and abhorrence—a response to which I think I would like to add.

The substance of his message is that Romans 1 identifies homosexuals as wicked and deserving of death, and thus we should not mourn at the death of 50 ‘sodomites’, but should see it as ‘great’. We should rather mourn that someone didn’t ‘finish the job’.

Somehow he also manages to claim that the Bible says that all homosexuals are predators and pedophiles, which it doesn’t, and he encourages his listeners to find the verse where Paul says that the wicked ‘receive in themselves the due penalty for their perversion’, and next to it write ‘AIDS’.

There is so much wrong with what that man says that I imagine that most of us think it is self-evident from a Christian perspective. Yet this is an occasion on which I think it should not go without saying. So let me make a few corrections first of the theory:

None of what that man says is ‘the word of God’, as he claims. Preachers throw that phrase around far too much. The Bible may well be the word of God, but interpretation of it is the word of man. Stop pinning the idiotic mess of an interpretation that you’ve made on God.

Homosexuality may well be a sin, according to the Bible, but look more carefully at what Romans 1 is saying. Paul gives dual realms in which rebellion against God leads to debasement: the first is bodily (1:24) and the example given is of homosexuality (for reasons not worth going into now). The second realm is in the mind (1:28) and note what expressions of debasement it leads to: the full gamut from murder to gossip, slander and disobedience to one’s parents. It is the end of these people that is death (1:32).

So according to the argument of the text that this ‘pastor’ claims to be using, sin is idolatry (the rejection of God for substitutes); it expresses itself in various ways, including covetousness and gossip; and everyone who sins has a death penalty over them. So if we’re to rejoice at the death of the homosexual, then we must rejoice also at the death of the nice gossipy old lady who sits in church every week.

And indeed, if slander is among these crimes worthy of death, what must be done with the man who slanders homosexuals by claiming that they are all predators and pedophiles?

Let’s take further issue with the manner of that man’s sermon. Leaving aside his slander, how is it that one can read the Bible and still be arrogant towards those who sin? Has he not realised (if he has indeed been forgiven) the magnitude of his own debt from which he has been released? Perhaps God will spare him that penalty of death, but does he deserve it any less?

Oddly, in spite of choosing a text from this section, he has failed to understand the overall (and very obvious) point of Romans 1-3, namely, that there is no one who is righteous before God, but that everyone is under the penalty of death—even the self-righteous law-keeper who delights in condemning the sins of the outsider (Romans 2:1-24).

Listen to what Paul says about homosexuality elsewhere:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality,nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1Corinthians 6:9-11)

It’s all very well railing on the ‘sinner’ deserving death, but if Christianity is about one thing, it’s about seeing oneself in that hopeless position, not railing on the outsider.

In fact, Paul makes this explicit just a chapter earlier. It is often said that Christians should not judge, but Paul disagrees. We should judge, he says. Only we should judge those within the church. Observe:

But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of [Christian] if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one.For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?God judgesthose outside. (1Corinthians 5:11-13a)

I wish Christians would put this verse on a fridge-magnet. Why do we never hear fiery evangelical sermons on this subject? Perhaps Verity Baptist Church can consider this passage for their next sermon series? The sinner that the church should be interested in judging and expelling is this revolting pastor. God will determine what is to be done to those on the outside.

Homosexuality is regarded as a sin in the Bible, but the same Bible tells us to love the sinner and mourn for those who die far from God. Anyone who thinks that God approves of their hate best beware:

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.And [Jesus] answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way?No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem?No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:1-5)